Page 41 of The Last Great Omegaverse

I’ve read about this. Every Omega has, somewhere between health class and the pamphlets nobody actually reads. Nesting behavior, pre-heat instinct, a body preparing a safe space out of scent-marked items from Alphas it trusts. I’ve just never done it. Never had trusted items to gather, growing up. Never let anyone close enough to leave something behind worth building a nest out of.

I sit with that a long moment, surrounded by four Alpha’s worth of borrowed fabric, and instead of the panic I’d have expected a month ago, what actually rises up in me is something closer to grief—for a version of myself who spent twenty-five years without ever once feeling safe enough to do this. Not fear of losing myself to the instinct. Something more like mourning all the years I didn’t have anything worth nesting in.

I could take it apart. Some old, cautious part of me flags the option immediately, efficient as ever, already halfway to convincing me this is exactly the kind of surrender my mother spent a lifetime warning me against, the body making choices the mind never agreed to, comfort built out of other people’s scent instead of my own resources.

But I don’t take it apart.

Instead, I sit in it and pull Cal’s old shirt around my shoulders. I let myself have this one small, undignified, entirely instinctive thing without immediately building an argument against it. It’s not surrender, I decide, somewhere in the quiet of my own bedroom. It’s not my body overriding my mind. It’s just my body finally getting to want something it’s been quietly denied, now that there’s finally something worth wanting it for.

I’m still sitting there, half-buried in it, when I hear Dot’s car in the drive.

It’s four o’clock as she arrives unannounced, letting herself onto the porch with a bag of something delicious from the bakery and an expression that suggests she’s heard, through whatever channel this town’s gossip travels fastest, that I’ve gone quiet in a way that’s worrying people.

“You’ve turned your phone off,” she says, settling into the chair beside mine without asking. “Coop came by the bar looking like somebody kicked his dog. Didn’t say why. Didn’t need to.”

“I needed a day.”

“Fair enough. Everybody’s entitled to a day.” She sets the bakery bag between us, unopened, more a peace offering than an actual demand that I eat something. “Cal tell you, then? About the land?”

“You knew the whole story.”

“Whole town knows, but they won’t say it plainly to outsiders until they’re ready to hear it.” She studies me a long moment, no judgment in it, just the same patience she’s shown me since the first night I walked into her bar hungry and furious. “Your grandmother went through this same spiral, you know. Near enough sixty years back, when she first started seriously courting your grandfather. Sat right about where you’re sitting now, told me she didn’t trust a single feeling in her own chest anymore, couldn’t tell where the land’s opinion ended and hers began.”

“What did she do?”

“Married him anyway.” Dot shrugs, like the answer’s simpler than the question deserved. “Told me, years later, that the doubt never fully went away. Said she just decided, eventually, that choosing him felt better than not choosing him, uncertainty included, and that was enough of an answer to build a whole life on.” She reaches over, patting my knee once. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, honey. Not my place, and frankly, I don’t think you’d listen even if it was. But I’d hate to watch you talk yourself out of something good just because you can’t prove it’s uncomplicated. Nothing worth having ever fully is.”

I sit with that a long while after she leaves, the bakery bag finally opened, the light turning orange and then gray over the fields. I think about Eleanor’s journal, and the choice she made and apparently never regretted.

I won’t turn my phone back on tonight. But I stop running the old loop quite so hard, and somewhere past dark, sitting alone on a porch that’s finally starting to feel like mine again instead of a stranger’s, I let myself admit, just to the dark and the wind chime and nobody else, I don’t want to talk myself out of this. I just need to find my way back to it on my own terms, the way Eleanor apparently did, the way I never quite managed the last time somebody asked me to choose them.

I still have some decisions of my own to make.

Chapter 18

Asher

Cal calls us to breakfast two days after he spent the night in his cabin with Wren. He hasn’t told us what happened that night, but we could smell her all over him when he returned. She hasn’t contacted any of us since, which is more concerning that it should be.

None of his usual economy of words managing to soften what he’s laying out. The legend. The ledgers. The conversation in his cabin that ended, from what little he’ll say about it, with Wren walking out before he woke and her phone going dark sometime afterward.

“The folklore,” he says, watching his coffee instead of any of us. “That’s the part that’s got Wren spiraling. She’s not sure anymore what’s actually hers to choose in all of it. I thought I’d talked her through it, but obviously I hadn’t.”

For a long moment none of us says anything useful. Then Silas, predictably, is the one who says what none of the rest of us wants to say first.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this at all.”

“Doing what?” Coop asks, though I think we all know exactly what he means.

“Any of it. Taking an Omega into this pack. Full stop, land or no land, legend or no legend.” Silas doesn’t look up from his coffee, his voice flat in the way that means he’s been sitting on this longer than this morning. “We’ve run with four Alphas under one roof for years without anybody needing to be anybody’s whole world. Nobody’s had to build their life around somebody else’s survival. That’s not nothing. That’s a specific kind of safe we built on purpose, and I don’t know that any of us has actually sat down and asked whether we want to give it up.”

“That’s not fair,” Coop says, real hurt in it. “You’re talking like she’s a liability instead of a person.”

“I’m talking like a man whose seen what happens when someone couldn’t function without one specific person keeping him upright.” Something under Silas’s voice tightens, even though it doesn’t rise. “I’ve spent my whole adult life making sure it wasn’t going to be me. Cal’s spent his whole life the same way.”

The table’s quiet at that. Cal doesn’t argue it, doesn’t even look up right away, just turns his mug slowly in his hands like it’s suddenly become the most interesting object in the room.

“He’s not wrong,” Cal says finally. “I watched my father lose himself over an Omega he built his entire life around. Everything he was just come apart, because he’d never built anything of himself that could stand without her holding half of it up.” He sets the mug down. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do that. Wasn’t going to let one person become load-bearing in a life I could otherwise keep standing on its own.”